Primary Data Accelerates Growth with New Funding and Launch of DataSphere 2.0

$40M Raised Through $20 Million Second Round Led by Pelion Ventures and $20M Line of Credit to Fuel Continued Sales Growth as Primary Data Enables Machine Learning for Intelligent Data Management with Launch of DataSphere 2.0 Enterprise Metadata Engine Software and Unveils New Industry Partnerships

LOS
ALTOS, Calif. – Aug.
2, 2017 – Primary
Data, creator of the world’s first enterprise metadata engine, today
announced that it has raised a total of $40 million USD in its second round of
funding to support continued sales growth in tandem with the 2.0 release of its
DataSphere software platform for intelligent and automated data management at
petabyte scale. The funding includes a $20million investment with
participation from Pelion
Venture Partners, Accel, Battery Ventures, and strategic
investors from prior rounds, as well as a $20 million line of credit to support
sales acceleration amidst the new product release and new industry
partnerships.

“The days of manual data management are coming to
an end, and this investment round indicates the growth our investors also see
on the horizon,” said Lance Smith, Primary Data Chief Executive Officer. “Our
second raise is strategically aligned to our plans for building out our sales
team and our business. As data volumes scale out and up into the cloud,
enterprises are looking for a way to intelligently manage and automate how data
is managed across different storage systems. DataSphere 2.0 brings machine
learning to data management, enabling our customers to set policies that ensure
they have the right data in the right place at the right time, automatically
and without application disruption.”

To bring machine learning
into data management, DataSphere collects metadata of a client’s data access
and how it experiences the IOPS, latency, bandwidth and availability provided
by storage. Intelligent analytics are then applied against the metadata,
enabling DataSphere to match business requirements for performance, cost and
reliability, make real-time automated decisions, move data without application
disruption to overcome or prevent outages, and maintain compliance of service
level agreements or objectives. The ability to automatically manage data by
objectives enables enterprises to maximize the value of existing infrastructure
and easily integrate with the cloud to achieve unprecedented improvements in
performance, efficiency and scalability.DataSphere’s
global namespace makes different storage systems simultaneously available to applications,
operating out of band and without application interruption. This delivers
unprecedented control and integration across flash, NAS and cloud storage
systems.

“Automating data
management through an intelligent data fabric that spans different types of
storage is critical to enabling enterprises to fully leverage their data while
finally solving storage complexity,” said Blake Modersitzki, Managing Director
at Pelion Venture Partners. “With DataSphere, Primary Data is leading the industry
in bringing intelligence to data management across the enterprise and into the
cloud, and we are proud to invest in the transformation Primary Data is
delivering for its innovative customers.”

Emphasizing the
importance of DataSphere’s vendor-agnostic data management capabilities, in the
March 2017 report, “How to
Use SDS for Storage Management in Petabyte-scale Environments,” Gartner Analyst Santhosh Rao advised, “Software-defined storage (SDS) products from
storage vendors that are positioned for storage management and automation often
provide limited to no integration with other storage vendor portfolios. I&O
leaders evaluating SDS tools for storage management as part of their
infrastructure modernization strategy must choose products that can perform
multivendor storage management.”

customer-requested
features and powerful management capabilities, such as Objective Expressions
and other highlights:

Control Your Data’s Destiny with Objective
Expressions: DataSphere 2.0 enables IT to quickly choose from
a catalog of data objectives, and now provides deep control capabilities with
Objective Expressions, developed by Primary Data co-founder and CTO David
Flynn. Data mobility and allocation can be set according to built-in file
system, user-extended and programmable attributes.

Get the Right Data to the Cloud:
Easily move data at the file-level to both private and public clouds, with the
ability to automatically retrieve it back to performance storage if needed
again. Parallel performance and support for multiple clouds delivers agility
and flexibility to scale cloud adoption in tandem with business objectives. Snapshot
enhancements deliver the ability to move or copy data to the cloud to protect
data without impacting enterprise capacity.

Keep Your Windows Open from NFS to SMB:
DataSphere 2.0 adds support for SMB 2.1 and 3.1, as well as Active Directory.
DataSphere also supports shares used by both Windows and NFS (Linux) clients to
ensure that security and file permissions are handled correctly across both NFS
and SMB.

Connect and Recover Without Interruption:
DataSphere 2.0 provides metadata assimilation of NFS storage without
interrupting data access, so that data can be seamlessly moved into the DataSphere global
namespace without the need to copy data. Virtual networks, VLAN
support and support for IPv6 and IPv4 environments meet enterprise customer
requirements for supporting large network environments. Snapshot enhancements
deliver the ability to move or copy data to the cloud to protect data without
impacting enterprise capacity.

See What You’ve Been Missing: A
number of new features enable IT to see and control data across their entire
storage ecosystem. An updated user interface provides a new look and feel, new
objectives can be created based on existing ones, and objects links throughout
the UI facilitate navigation. In addition, Cloud Mover statistics provide
insight on data activity in the cloud and a new dashboard provides metadata
details about application and stores.

“When technology is complex, it often means we need
to figure out a better solution to the problem,” said Steve Wozniak, Primary
Data Chief Scientist. “DataSphere 2.0 makes it simple for enterprises to
finally automate how data is managed by using the intelligence that has been
sitting right there in your metadata all along.”

Primary Data develops intelligence and automation software for
enterprise data management across on-premises IT infrastructure and into the cloud. Its
DataSphere platform combines metadata management and machine learning to move the
right data to the right place at the right time across a global namespace, automatically
and without application disruption. DataSphere makes heterogeneous data
stores simultaneously available to all applications, enabling enterprises operating
at petabyte scale to easily manage billions of files, automate data
migration, integrate the cloud, and scale out NAS performance while getting
the most value out of infrastructure investments on a per-client, per-file
basis. To learn more, visit us at PrimaryData.com,
follow us on Facebook.com/PdDataSphere,
or Twitter at @Primary_Data.